How to Increase eMail Newsletter Subscribers by 200%

Despite all the talk about social media eMail is not disappearing and is still a very valuable way of maintaining contact with readers of your blog.

If you have a ‘subscribe now to my newsletter’ box on your website and have not focussed on increasing email newsletter subscribers you can easily increase the conversion rate by at least 200% if you follow some of the tips below.

1. Implement Social Proof

We are conditioned and influenced by other people around us. We have a herd mentality and are more likely to follow the herd than stick out on our own.

This can be used to our benefit when we want to increase our e-mail subscribers.

Tell your potential subscribers how many other people have also subscribed. Provide them with proof that you provide a fantastic newsletter by providing a quote from someone really influential that they admire.

Our Friends at Social Media Examiner let people know how many people have already subscribed. You may not have 195k subscribers but what if you have 500 subscribers. Will this be enough social proof to convince people to subscribe?

Social media examiner displays the large number of subscribers they have. This helps improve conversion.

Action – Implement social proof on your website to improve conversion. If your number of subscribers is small then get a quote from someone really influential in your niche that is prepared to say great things about you.

2. Provide an incentive.

You need to think of ‘What’s in it for me’. Why will I just subscribe to your newsletter. Think of an incentive you can offer that will help subscribers.

A common approach is to provide a free guide that your subscribers get when they subscribe. This can be applicable to any business, for example:

Business Consultancy – Sign up now and get a strategic marketing planning template.

Tourism Blog – Sign up now and get a free tourism guide for your area

Entrepreneur Blog – Subscribe and get 20 tips from some of the leading entrepreneurs around the world.

Mari Smith (Facebook Marketing Expert) provides 2 free bonus reports to incentivize people to subscribe. If Mari wanted to improve this subscription I would provide a little more information on what the bonus reports will do for me!

Mari Smith provides 2 free downloads as an incentive

Neil Patel (founder of CrazyEgg and Kissmetrics) provides a great incentive for people to subscribe. When you subscribe you get a free course that will double your traffic in 30 days. There’s also a value put on what you will get at $300. This gives you a further incentive to subscribe.

Neil provides a free course to get subscribers. A monetary value is put on the course which helps.

3. Use a Popup

To catch people’s attention a popup (e.g. Optinmonster) can be useful. You have to careful that you don’t annoy people with the same popup appearing every page of your website and when the popup appears it’s not providing any great incentive to subscribe. But popup’s can be very effective if used right. The following shows an example of Amy Porterfield’s popup (Facebook Marketing expert).

This popup provides social proof and incentives to subscribe

You can see social proof also implemented above (e.g. Amy has been featured on Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Fast Company and Mashable.

4. Add More Subscription Options

David Halpern from Social Triggers and David Risley from Blog Marketing Academy have some great information about where to put subscription boxes on your blog. Here are some tips we gleaned from them that is working for us:

You don’t want to over do it by providing options to subscribe in too many places but there are some obvious places to put subscription boxes:

a). Right hand side of all pages – This is the most common place to find subscription boxes. Your visitors generally read top to bottom left to right. So over on the right hand side of the page is a good place to put a subscription box.

b). Footer – If someone has scrolled all the way to the bottom of your page they can’t go any further. This is a good place to put a subscription box.

c). End of Blog Post – If your reader gets to the bottom of a blog post then you have a good chance to convince them to subscribe by having a subscription box.

d). About Us – Quite often your visitors may leave your site after reading the about page so this is a great place to increase subscribers.

e). Feature Box – David Halpern more or less invented the feature box which is a subscription option that appears on the home page generally under the banner image. Check out ours on Razorsocial!

5. Test with Words

The words you use for subscription can have a serious impact on your subscription rates. What words do you use in your headings, content or call to action button. For example, in your call to action button do you say subscribe now, get updates, join now etc.

This is something you really need to test out to see what works for you.

What has worked for you to increase you subscription rates? Will you implement any of the above?

About The Author

Ian

Author: Ian Cleary is the Founder of RazorSocial. We deliver you improved productivity and results for social media using tools and technology.

http://twitter.com/Carolyn_Arnold Carolyn Arnold

Thank you for this article. I’m just getting started with this avenue of marketing. Very informative.

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Hey Carolyn, glad it was useful! Thanks for the feedback, Ian

Jenny Taaffe

Great article Ian! I like the point about Social Proof!

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Thanks Jenny, Glad you liked it! Ian

http://twitter.com/KDHungerford Kelly Hungerford

Hi Ian, good ideas there. I seem to be bombarded daily by pop-ups when visiting sites which tells me a lot of people are experimenting! Do you have figures or stats on best practices for pop-ups such as when and where, size, device..) Thanks, and as always, good advice!

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Hey Kelly, I’m experimenting at the moment but unfortunately don’t have stats yet. At the moment we use them at the end of blog posts so you’ll have to be on the site a bit before you see it. We’re using pippity but I’m find it is quite buggy! Here’s an interesting article from Chris Penn showing what happened when he disabled the popup! – http://www.christopherspenn.com/2012/07/the-popup-is-back-again/. Have a great week-end!!! Ian

http://twitter.com/KDHungerford Kelly Hungerford

Thanks Ian. It’s tough to shake a stick at that! Thanks for pointing it out the post.

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Let me come back on popups. there’s more work to be done there!

http://twitter.com/jenillustre jennifer illustre

Hi there! Thanks for the helpful tips. I’m scared about pop ups as they have a tendency to be annoying. Perhaps an article about not making annoying pop-ups.?

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Hey Jennifer, thanks for the feedback. I’ll certain consider a post on the best popups to use and how to make them less annoying, thank you so much for your feedback! Ian

Seamus

Absolutely brilliant!

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Thank you Seamus!

http://www.buraq-technologies.com/ ambreen11

Thanks for the tips. Email is a great for blogs in less tech-savvy
niches. I always prioritize it over RSS in those areas. There are a
surprising number of people who don’t know about RSS yet.

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Thank you for your comment. You’re right about RSS, it’s certainly very handy to stop your e-mail box getting cluttered!

Guest

Great list. Didn’t know about pingraphy.

http://www.razorsocial.com/ Ian Cleary

Pingraphy wasn’t included in this article but I guess you are talking about my post on convince and convert to-day!